New EIS Complex Highlights Collaboration

SDSU College of Sciences

A Jan. 16 debut is set for SDSU’s new, cooperatively focused Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences Complex.

The future of scientific progress, engineering advances and medical breakthroughs will require more than pure intelligence and hard work—it will also require people from multiple disciplines to come together and pool their disparate bases of knowledge. San Diego State University’s new Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences (EIS) Complex is designed to be a place for that, with the promise of partnership built into its architecture. Kicking off a new era of scientific and engineering collaboration at SDSU, the EIS Complex formally opens its doors to the campus community on Tuesday, Jan. 16. The grand opening ceremony begins with a ribbon cutting at 12:30 p.m., followed by tours and an open house event from 1-2 p.m. “I’m looking forward to seeing the collaborations that result from our scientists and engineers being co-located under the same roof,” said Stephen Welter, vice president for research and dean of Graduate Affairs. “The new complex has a world-class set of labs and facilities that just did not exist on this campus before.”The 85,000-square-foot, $90 million complex is designed to encourage cooperative thinking. It features mobile furniture to assemble quick meetings; glass walls to keep an eye on what others are working on; communal whiteboards in the hallways for spur-of-the-moment brainstorming; and a coffee shop to fuel all this genius. The Thomas B. Day Quad—named for SDSU’s sixth president who championed the university’s research expansion and whose family’s generous donation was integral to the complex’s construction—serves as the building’s central meeting place. Numerous spaces within the complex are named after other donors who support SDSU’s mission of becoming a top public research university. (Naming opportunities are still available for several critical facilities within EIS.)Aesthetically, its California Mission Revival style draws …